WILLEMSTAD - Curaçao spends considerably more money on people who retire early than budgeted. Ten million guilders had been reserved for it, but seventeen million guilders had already been spent up to October. This is reported by the Board of financial supervision.
Civil servants approaching retirement have the option of retiring earlier through an early retirement scheme. The measure is necessary because Curaçao has a big problem with older and therefore more expensive civil servants.
The scheme also had to address the efficiency of the civil service because labor productivity - partly due to the large number of older civil servants - is too much to be desired.
Whether or not this goal will be achieved is uncertain. The outflow of civil servants has not yet led to a rejuvenation of the civil service, but to understaffing and a higher workload for the people who stayed.
In one year, approximately 600 civil servants have made use of the redundancy scheme. The advantage is lower personnel costs, but therefore also higher one-off severance costs.
Overtime expenditures are also threatening to be overrun, while the Pisas government had previously said it would tackle rising overtime charges. The Board now wants to know what the government has done in recent months to fulfill that promise.